


Pyre

by UrbanAmazon



Category: Bourne (Movies), The Bourne Supremacy (2004)
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 11:44:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2810897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UrbanAmazon/pseuds/UrbanAmazon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one ever taught Jason Bourne how to grieve.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pyre

**Author's Note:**

  * For [blue_spruce](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blue_spruce/gifts).



Jason Bourne hates the word ‘instinct’, for two reasons. First, he hates the illogic of its implications, in that a person might be naturally inclined to deception, subterfuge, and decisive violence (and betrayal, if his former keepers are to be believed). After years of running, there are still gaps, things he knows but does not remember, but the only rational thing to assume is that at one point or another, someone (parent? friend? ~~Treadstone?~~ self?) taught him how to do it. 

Second, he hates that it might be accurate all the same. 

It’s a small blessing that they can be innocent things now (or they look innocent with nothing but nothing under the surface). Marie caught him replacing the transmission on a scooter once. She said nothing, only folded her arms and leaned in the doorframe as she watched his hands move without hesitation through the accumulating smears of grease and leaky fluid. He remembers the weight of her gaze, now easily translated into a welcome sort of attention instead of a silent alarm. Perhaps she was making up a story for him, a happy and human story that she’d never share so he would never have to deny it.

_Your cousin taught you,_ Jason imagines her saying, her accent falling softer over the consonants so many more hundred miles from home. _You both had to get it fixed before your uncle came home and caught you with a broken scooter. You’d never read an owner’s manual so fast._

Or perhaps Jason was making it up that she might be making it up. She always coaxed honesty from him, unflinchingly. _Sooner or later,_ she promised after another dream forced him awake in the middle of the feverish night, _you’ll remember something good. You’ve had enough people lying to you. Don’t give them any more help._

Jason will never have her optimism, but he keeps writing all the broken pieces down, like shaping together a hundred jigsaw puzzles made of glass. He wants to remember, just to see her smile when she learns she’s right about him. 

Not all of the dreams are nightmares. He dreams, once, of a plain office with paneled ceiling tiles stained tobacco-smoke gray. _Understand that you will die,_ says a voice, faceless. _You will die in service of a cause. An ideal. There is no afterlife, no second chance, only this… until there isn’t. And there is a difference between knowing that fact, and accepting it. If you have any lingering fears over this, soldier, let’s get them out right now._ Someone, once, taught Jason how to accept his own death. It fits into the puzzle that is his head, easier than so many of the other pieces; he knows his limits, his soft points, where he is strong and where he will break… he knows he can die. He will die.

He’s never thought on it much, other than to not seek it out. He survives, even when it means the people trying to kill him do not. They exist outside the equation, tangents that cease to matter after they are gone. Jason doesn’t have to process their deaths any more than he’d process changing a scooter’s transmission… but there’s a difference between killing a person and watching them die.

The moment he hears the glass shatter, the moment he sees Marie’s head snap forward, Jason thinks, _Oh, god no._

Then, as the jeep crashes into the river, _I don’t know what to do._

Treadstone never taught him anything about this. No one did.

\---

It takes Jason Bourne sixty seconds in the green waters of the Sal River to learn everything he never wanted to know about denial. Sixty seconds, a last kiss on lips gone soft and unsmiling, and Marie is gone.

\---

He burns the identification documents with dry eyes. All of the stolen names Jason gave Marie like flowers curl and blacken, the plastic sizzling grotesquely as it melts through seals and hidden identification chips. Her real passport burns just as readily, hiding Marie Helena Kreutz in the ashes; he can’t use it, can’t think of any safe reason to keep it. The photographs are only so much ink on glossy paper, all in strips from photo booths and drugstore offices. They’re empty now. The person they depict no longer exists.

He burns them because… because he’s supposed to? Because no one else will touch them, use her name or her face? Because no one will ever find her, ever use her against him, or ever track down her brother? Because it’s protocol? Jason doesn’t know. His hands move automatically because his mind can’t. 

She’s gone. 

It feels like a funeral, or as much of a funeral as he could afford to spare. If the local authorities ever find her in the river, she’ll be interred without ceremony, or possibly even without a marker. They never made friends in Goa, or coworkers, or ever made it a point to leave fingerprints on anyone’s lives but their own. Treadstone (if it is Treadstone that found them, that killed her) will have nothing to grasp. 

Marie is even more a ghost than he is now. She’s gone, she’s gone, she’s gone-

Jason’s hands still on that last photograph, the one shot by a photographer that mistook them for tourists on the beach with her long hair dyed blonde by the sun and his crisp white shirt. He’d paid double the asking fee in order to have the photographer delete the original as well. It was the only photograph of the two of them that wasn’t some blurry surveillance-camera shot in a CIA file halfway across the world.

He’s about to fold it over and flick it into the embers to burn when he thinks, _What if I forget all of this, too?_

It’s ridiculous, in theory; retrograde amnesia damages access to _previous_ memories, and the incident that turned his life into everything he was trained _not_ to do was a one-in-a-million chance that should have left him dead in the middle of the Mediterranean. It’s hardly logical to consider that same lightning striking twice and leaving him alive. More than that, Jason’s mind snaps up details with blade’s-edge clarity, possibly to compensate for all the emptiness. He remembers the ammonia-smell of hair dye as clearly as the shape of her hand on his arm, as the taste of the river water. 

_I do remember something good,_ he’d said. _All the time._

And he does. He remembers sharing that first coffee with her in a truck stop hours outside of Zurich ( _three sugar, one cream_ ). He remembers her purple shade of fingernail polish when she kissed him first ( _a soft kiss on his lip, unhurried like he might be the one to run from her_ ). It’s all there, _right there_ , the only timeline of events he’s come to trust as completely real.

But now she’s gone, and all evidence of the life they had together is burning at his feet. Without her, Treadstone is all he has left to define ‘Jason Bourne’, and that thought makes him wonder if he should throw himself into the fire instead.

Jason stares at that photograph until the fire sputters into blackened celluloid and wood ash. His knuckles cramp, holding it tightly. 

_We don’t have a_ choice, he’d argued, nerves humming and gun clenched tight.

_Yes, you do._ He remembered her voice soft and firm, unafraid. She’d be certain, so certain, that he was _more_ , right to her very last breath.

Jason doesn’t know that. Couldn’t know that… but Treadstone _does._

\---

_It’s what you are, Jason. A killer. You always will be,_ wheezes Ward Abbott, face-down on his desk and waiting for a martyr’s cleansing bullet. 

_She wouldn’t want me to. That’s the only reason you’re alive._

Jason pulls the tape recorder, and not the trigger, because he chooses to. It’s hard, _so_ hard, like pulling the nerves out of his own skin. It’s not a scooter transmission… but it’s a start. He can imagine her leaning in the doorway with folded arms, smiling softly as he keeps surviving long enough to learn she’d been right.


End file.
